


Meningitis

by taylor_tut



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Sick Character, Sickfic, meningitis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 16:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10723011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: Lance is sicker than the paladins think during training. The reality of that hits them hard.





	Meningitis

“Pidge, Lance, you’re up,” Shiro announced. Hunk elbowed Lance in the ribs, and he startled awake with a groan. The other paladins knew he’d woken up with a cold, but he hadn’t had a fever this morning, so he’d insisted he was fine even though he wanted nothing more than to curl up and go right back to bed. Even now, only about two hours into the day, he felt infinitely worse than he had just this morning.  He was shivering, and it was difficult to keep his eyes open. Pidge noticed. 

“I don’t want to train with Lance,” Pidge complained, “He’s all… _germy.”_

Shiro rolled his eyes. “It’s just a cold. He doesn’t have a fever, and he’ll be wearing his helmet the whole time.”

Pidge huffed. “Fine,” she resigned, walking to the center of the ring and crouching, waiting for her sparring partner to be ready. 

“I won’t even use my bayard,” Lance muttered, “I’m my own personal bio-weapon.” Pidge shuddered hard and threw her hands into the air in mock surrender.

“That’s it; I’m not sparring him,” she forfeited. Shiro sputtered.

“You have to,” he ordered. 

“Look at him!” Pidge pointed out, “I’m not sure he should be sparring at all.”

Upon closer inspection, Lance _did_  look a lot worse for wear than this morning. Before Shiro could examine him, Keith stepped into the ring.

“I’ll spar Lance,” he volunteered.

Lance could feel that this wasn’t a good idea. The headache he’d woken up with had increased in intensity to the point of blinding, and indescribable pain shot through his skull when he moved his head forward or back. As a result, he took his place in the ring stiffly. He could barely keep his eyes open, feeling absolutely drained before the fight even began.

Shiro counted backward from three and Keith lunged forward. Lance protected his face with his bayard, never letting his neck move. He couldn’t attack, not in this condition. He needed to tap out, but Keith didn’t let up. Lance stiffly blocked attack after attack, staggering backward a bit with each blow.

“Keith, ease up a bit; he’s sick,” Shiro advised. Keith’s attacks slowed in frequency and decreased in intensity, but Lance still found that he couldn’t make a move of his own. His vision was swimming in front of his eyes, and the pain was so bad that he was sure he’d be sick.

Lance dropped his bayard to the ground and backed away from Keith, losing his footing and falling to the ground. He inched blindly backward, not even recognizing that the red paladin had haulted his assault. 

“Lance? Are you okay?” Shiro asked from the sidelines. 

“Something’s not right,” he admitted, gingerly removing his helmet. The migraine had officially transcended the limitations of “normal amounts of pain” and skyrocketed right into “I might be dying” territory.

“What hurts?” Shiro worried, hopping into the ring and dropping to his knees beside Lance. 

“Head,” was all Lance could manage through gritted teeth. 

Shiro’s hand was pressed to Lance’s forehead and he cursed. “How’d he spike such a high fever so fast?” Shiro asked frantically. Lance wasn’t listening. He was going to be sick, he knew that much, but the thought of leaning over to vomit sent phantom pains through his neck, and he knew it wasn’t an option. He opted instead for pushing himself away from Shiro with his foot and hauling himself into a kneeling position so he could angle himself forward just enough to vomit onto the ground and get only minimal amounts of it on his armor.

“Lance!” Keith’s voice was frantic. 

“I told you he shouldn’t be training,” Pidge warned. 

“Lance, can you hear me?” Hunk asked. Lance reached for his hand and squeezed. “This is very important, Lance. I need you to put your chin to your chest for me. Can you do that?”

Lance couldn’t even make it more than a few millimeters forward before crying out in pain, his vision darkening.

“Shiro, he needs a pod immediately,” Hunk explained. “I think Lance has meningitis.”

Lance knew about meningitis. They’d had to attend a small seminar about it and some other communicable diseases before living in the dormitories at Garrison. The two things he remembered about it were that it was highly contagious and often deadly.

“Stay back,” Lance fought weakly as Keith and Shiro tried to pick him up. “You’re going to get sick, too.”

“We’re not worried about that right now,” Keith brushed him off, but Lance wasn’t having it.

“I am,” he argued. 

“Lance, don’t,” Shiro scolded, fighting Lance as he tried to wrestle his helmet back on to his head. 

“Either I wear a helmet, or you two do,” he said in a frail voice that had made up its mind. Shiro sighed, but finally resigned, handing Keith his helmet and putting on his own. 

“Happy now?” Keith bit, but he didn’t get a reply. “Lance?”

Lance heard the voices of his concerned friends around him, but he figured that his part of training was probably over; it was someone else’s turn to spar, and he let himself tune them out. By the time Allura and Coran were examining him in the med bay, he was already unconscious.

The other four paladins paced, waiting for some kind of news on their friend. No one spoke, not for a long time, until Allura finally cracked open the door and poked her head out. 

“He’ll be okay,” she reassured. The group relaxed visibly. “But he very nearly wasn’t. He’s got septicemia, and we’re very lucky that Altean technology can fix that. On Earth, he’d have lost a foot today, likely even most of his right leg. As it stands, he’ll make a full recovery. Another hour, and we’d be having a very different conversation.”

The gravity of how ill Lance had become was not lost on the paladins as they watched him breathe through the window of the healing pod. “ _On Earth, he’d have lost a leg.”_ If Lance had gotten sick like this at Garrison and it had taken his friends this long to realize he needed help, he could have died. 

It would be an unbearably quiet few days until Lance emerged from the healing pod.


End file.
